The Literary Life

In this week’s Times Literary Supplement, Michael Greenberg writes about the Beckettian absurdity of Book Expo America, and the pressure to be a show-stopping salesman for your literary product—in his case, a memoir (which comes out this fall)—in two minutes or less:

The atmosphere was one of gladiatorial combat. Sitting next to me was a perfectly bald man in pressed designer jeans and Prada mocassins, emanating a mixture of arrogance and urgent need. He turned out to be Evan Handler, an actor whose recurring role in Sex in the City had made him a minor celebrity.

(Only in the TLS could you get away with messing up the name “Sex and the City”!)

“Which circle of hell are we in?”, he asked me. His book, It’s Only Temporary: The good news and the bad news of being alive, is about his “miraculous” recovery from leukaemia, and his twenty-seven break-ups with ten women after he crawled back to a semblance of normal existence. “At the moment I’m trying to figure out if it was really worth it to stay alive.”